Labor, Materials, & Ritual Knowledge: Erecting and Erasing Middle Woodland

Enclosures in Southern Appalachia

By Alice P. Wright

“Biographies of Enclosure in Global Context”

Organized by Ian Armit, Lindsay Büster, and Jennifer Birch

80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California

[1 - Title slide] As we all know, a traditional biography traces the history of someone’s

life from birth, through growth and maturity, to death. Even as this trajectory stretches over

decades, written accounts of a person’s life tend to focus on the pivotal moments that relate to

wider historical currents. These events are the ones that made headlines in the past, produced a

written record for historians to unpack, and presumably had a lasting impact on the wider sweep

of history.

[2] Archaeological biographies of monuments, including biographies of enclosures, tend

to follow this same organizational strategy. Charles and Buikstra made this point clearly about a

decade ago in a brief discussion of Stonehenge.1 Particular events in the life history of this iconic

monument – its initial demarcation and modification during the Neolithic – left clear traces in the

archaeological record. In contrast, its lack of alteration in the Iron Age constituted a “non-event,”

generating no material indicators of activity that we can clearly pinpoint as archaeologists. This

is not to say that Stonehenge was an unimportant feature of the Iron Age landscape, merely that

our ability to understand its role at this time is hampered by the nature of the evidence we rely

on.

[3] Most often made of earth instead of stone, ceremonial enclosures in Eastern North

America, some of which are illustrated here,2 are often examined from a similar biographical

perspective, with a focus on the events of enclosure construction or birth. Today I’d like to

present a case study that examines not only this earliest event in an enclosure’s biography, but

also the end of its life history. Like Stonehenge, the life histories of many archaeological

monuments do not include a finite “death,” but rather a prolonged obsolescence and the

occasional re-use and reincarnation.3 In contrast, at a small site in Southern Appalachia called

Garden Creek, a pair of earthen enclosures was recently discovered that attests not only to the

process of erecting enclosures, but also to their deconstruction and effective erasure from the

landscape. Today, I’d like to highlight how some of the variables that are relevant to

understanding the birth of enclosures – labor, materials, and ritual knowledge – are equally

salient to our understanding of their deaths. Furthermore, I argue that understanding how these

variables were organized throughout these enclosures’ life histories has important implications

for events and processes that stretch far beyond these biographies of enclosure and illuminate the

broader history of the Middle Woodland period in Eastern North America.

[4] Before diving into the evidence from Garden Creek, we can briefly consider what

labor, materials, and ritual knowledge stand to tell us about enclosure construction and

deconstruction. The labor required to build earthen monuments is an enduring concern among

archaeologists in Eastern North America. For decades, we have converted the volume of

earthwork or mound fills into “basketloads” to get a sense of how many people or person-hours

of labor would have been necessary to erect them.4 Labor requirements obviously increase with

the size of the monument. Just as importantly, they increase as the duration of construction

episodes decreases. Ortmann and Kidder’s recent work at Poverty Point has highlighted this

issue, insofar as they have demonstrated that Mound A was built without interruption, likely over

a matter of months, by truly massive assemblies of foragers.5

[5] The same geoarchaeological studies that have clarified the tempo of such construction

have also been important for understanding the sorts of materials used to build earthen

monuments.6 Rather than undifferentiated “basketloads” of mere dirt, it appears that the soils and

sediments used for earthwork construction were carefully selected by builders for a variety of

reasons, from color preference to their engineering properties.7 Because different materials

would have required different mining and transport costs, this variable can have dramatic

impacts on the amount of labor involved in building a mound or an earthen enclosure.

[6] The materials chosen for earthwork fills, mantles, and surfaces also attest to some of

the specialized engineering knowledge that was involved in their construction, earning the

moundbuilders of the Eastern Woodlands the title “the Da Vincis of dirt,” to quote Sarah

Sherwood and T.R. Kidder. Additionally, the layout of many earthwork sites in the region attest

to the specialized ritual knowledge of their architects, including their concern with particular

astronomical alignments.8 In sum, mounds and earthworks index the capacity of ancient North

American societies to harness raw human energy and to capitalize on particular bodies of

specialized knowledge.

[7] At this point, let’s turn our attention to a case study that highlights the roles of labor,

material, and ritual knowledge not only in enclosure construction, but also enclosure erasure. The

Garden Creek site is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and has

been known to archaeologists and antiquarians since the late 19th century. Since the 1960s, it has

figured in discussions of Hopewellian interaction in the Southeast, on account of its exotic

artifact assemblage and its proximity to mica outcrops that may have been targeted in

Hopewellian exchange. The site was recently the focus of a new round of non-invasive survey

and excavation which revealed the presence of two previously undetected Middle Woodland

enclosures hidden below the site’s modern day suburban landscape.

[8] The first hints of these enclosures were detected through a gradiometer survey that

Tim Horsley and I conducted in 2011. The noise generated by modern iron and intensive

plowing motivated a ground penetrating radar survey over these features, which more clearly

showed their identical, “squircular” footprints, as well as their mirror-image layouts with facing

gateways. The western enclosure, dubbed Enclosure No. 1, was then targeted for partial

excavation that captured approximately 10% of its total circumference. These efforts revealed

that the enclosure was a trapezoidal ditch excavated 1-1.2 meters into extremely dense, sandy

clay subsoil, which was subsequently filled in with three zones of anthropogenic sediments.

Neither the geophysical methods nor excavation detected any evidence of an embankment

associated with the enclosure ditches, but the intensive agricultural use of the site means that we

cannot rule out the possibility that one existed in prehistory.

[9] That said, previous studies of earthen embankments in the Eastern Woodlands, in

particular Wesley Bernardini’s research on Ohio Hopewell embankments, proved extremely

useful for pinpointing the labor required to excavate the Garden Creek enclosure ditches.9 The

trapezoidal shape of the ditch essentially rendered it an embankment in reverse, such that the

same equation that Bernardini used to calculate the volume of earth needed to erect a trapezoidal

embankment could be used to calculate the volume of earth that needed to be excavated from the

ditches. The results of this number crunching demonstrated that nearly 170 cubic meters of top

soil and sandy clay subsoil were moved to create the ditches of Enclosure’s No. 1 and 2 at

Garden Creek. Using Erasmus’s rate for earth moving with a digging stick (1.9 person-hours for

every cubic meter of earth10), we can estimate that the ditches required about 323 person-hours to

excavate. It should be noted that this value is a very conservative estimate, as it does not include

time for transporting excavated materials away from the ditches or creating a possible associated

embankment, or the person-hours of labor that would have gone toward feeding, sheltering, and

otherwise accommodating the laborers.

If we continue to follow Bernardini, and assume a 5-hour work day and 25-50 work

days/year, it becomes clear that the labor requirements for enclosure ditch digging were fairly

minimal. A single person could have done all the work in a single year, and a small group of

people could have done it is a single day. Unfortunately, because ditch digging is a reductive

process, we have no relevant contexts to date that might elucidate more precisely the tempo of

ditch excavation and enclosure construction.

[10] To consider the ritual knowledge involved in the erection of Garden Creek’s

enclosures, their plan view is most relevant. Their precise footprints and mirror-imaging suggest

a concerted, site-wide design logic that would have required careful measurement and

coordination. Importantly, this layout is not unique to the Garden Creek site; similar enclosures

with ditches and embankments have been identified at broadly contemporaneous sites in the

Ohio Valley, providing a line of architectural evidence supporting some sort of ritual interaction

between this region and the Southern Appalachians.11 In addition, the direction that the gateways

face may have astronomical significance. Preliminary analysis using GIS and accounting for

local elevation variation that effects the horizon line indicate that Enclosure No. 1’s gateway is

oriented toward the summer solstice sunrise while Enclosure No. 2’s gateway is oriented toward

the summer solstice sunset. Additional analysis promises to clarify these patterns, and address

the possibility of lunar alignments. To summarize, then, the datasets discussed so far indicate

that the earliest events in these enclosures’ life histories entailed low labor requirements but

precise ritual knowledge – patterns that simultaneously contrast and complement data from

contemporaneous sites, which I’ll discuss shortly.

[11] Before leaving Garden Creek, however, we also have an opportunity to assess the

end of these enclosures’ life histories, as they appear to have been filled in in prehistory. This in-

filling was a multi-stage project that culminated in the enclosures’ total erasure and the effective

“death” of the monuments. Each of these stages involved labor, particular materials, and

plausibly ritual knowledge. First, the ditches were entirely filled with anthropogenic sediment,

and if we assume no labor costs for transporting the sediment, then the labor required to re-fill

the ditches would be roughly the same as the labor required to excavate them. I should note here

that all findings related to ditch erasure stem from observations made during the excavation of

Enclosure No. 1. The seemingly unified design plan linking both enclosures lead me to believe

that similar activities were carried out at Enclosure No. 2, though this certainly requires further

groundtruthing.

[12] Once the ditch of Enclosure No. 1 was filled in, a line of large posts was emplaced

around its circumference. Based on the location and spacing of postholes in excavated units,

approximately 80 posts would have encompassed Enclosure No. 1; if we assume an identical

pattern at Enclosure No. 2, we’re talking about 160 total posts. In terms of labor, these would

have required the excavation of large postholes, at a cost of 8 person-hours, and provisioning of

the posts themselves, at a cost of 65.6 person-hours.12

[13] Finally, these posts were removed, and the resulting voids in the old ditch were filled

with cobbles likely obtained from the Pigeon River, roughly 200 m from the enclosures. Based

on the volume of the 160 empty postholes, 3.84 cubic meters of cobbles were required;

transporting the cobbles to the postholes would have required 24.6 person-hours of labor.

[14] In total, the infilling of the ditch, post emplacement, and cobble replacement

minimally required 420.8 person-hours of labor – more than the initial ditch excavations. Still,

these demands could have been met by small crews: 2 individuals working over the course of

one year, or around 50 individuals working for one day. While limited chronological resolution

precludes distinguishing between such tempos, dates associated with the deconstruction events

support a relatively fast-paced process. After some Bayesian modeling, AMS dates from the two

lowermost levels of ditch fill and the fill of one of the rock-filled postholes overlap almost

exactly, indicating that the entire sequence was completed quite quickly.

[15] The process of erasing the ditch also hints at the deployment of certain forms of

ritual knowledge. The staged occurrence ditch filling, post emplacement and removal, and

cobble installation speak to a prescribed sequence of events, perhaps indicating some sort of

closing ceremony. Additionally, particular artifact categories including mica and crystal quartz

debitage were recovered in the fill of the ditch at a much higher frequency than any other

excavated portion of the site. In other Middle Woodland contexts, such as Hopewell ritual

assemblages, these materials appear to carry significant symbolic import. Their presence in the

ditch fill underscore the likelihood that the activities associated with ditch erasure at Garden

Creek constituted some sort of ritualized event.

[16] In closing, then, erecting and erasing the enclosures at Garden Creek involved fairly

low labor demands in terms of raw person hours and the particular sorts of raw materials needed

to carry out the building process. Significantly, however, these events also called for prescribed

bodies of ritual knowledge that would have dictated not only enclosure layout early in their life

histories, but also the sequence of events that terminated their biographies. Like any good

biography, though, these specific events encourage us to consider the wider context of

contemporary historical process. Compared to Middle Woodland enclosures in the Ohio Valley

studied by Bernardini (seen here), the labor involved at Garden Creek was negligible, and could

likely be met by communities living in an immediate catchment area. However, the nature of the

ritualization of Garden Creek’s enclosures attest to a degree of shared ritual knowledge between

architectural specialists in the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians. In other words, even

though erecting and erasing Garden Creek’s enclosures may not have required many people, it

likely had to involve at least a few very particular people whose ritual knowledge implicates a

sort of interpersonal interaction that is not always captured in interregional formulations of the

Hopewell Interaction Sphere. [17] In this regard, the life history of Garden Creek’s enclosures

resonates most strongly when placed in proper historical context; by focusing on the microscale

– on the labor, materials, and ritual knowledge deployed at this one site – we generate both new

interpretations of and new questions about macroscalar events and histories.

1 (Charles and Buikstra 2002) 2 (Myer 1922; Squier and Davis 1848; Thompson and Pluckhahn 2012) 3 (Bender 1998; Holtorf 1998) 4 (Blitz and Livingood 2004) 5 (Ortmann and Kidder 2013) 6 (Sherwood and Kidder 2011) 7 (Van Nest 2006; Van Nest et al. 2001; Lynott 2004) 8 (e.g., Hively and Horn 1982) 9 (Bernardini 2004) 10 (Erasmus 1965) 11 (Burks 2014; Jefferies, Milner, and Henry 2013) 12 (Mathieu and Meyer 1997)

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Buikstra, 402–426. Gainseville: University Press of Florida.

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Labor, Materials, & Ritual Knowledge Erecting and Erasing Middle Woodland

Enclosures in Southern Appalachia

Alice P. Wright, PhDAppalachian State University

“Biographies of Enclosure in Global Context”80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

San Francisco, California

Eventful Enclosures

“The physical activities of making and modifying are our portals to the prehistoric past. Such unique or infrequent events... are readily identifiable and... they can be fixed in time.”

- Charles and Buikstra (2002:16)

IKEA instructions for erecting Stonehenge(Justin Pollard, 2011)

Woodland Enclosures in Eastern North America

Pinson, Tennessee (Myer 1922)

Seip, Ohio (Squier & Davis 1848)

Fort Center, Florida (Thompson & Pluckhahn 2012)

Earthwork Labor

• How much labor did earthwork construction or deconstruction require?

• How was such labor organized over time?

Topographic map of Poverty Point, Louisiana Division of Archaeology(Ortmann and Kidder 2013)

Earthwork Materials

• What materials were used to build an earthen mound or enclosure?

• How does this variable affect labor requirements?

Red clay and sand in Mound A, Shiloh, Tennessee, likely originated in deeply buried Pleistocene

sediments (Sherwood and Kidder 2011)

Earthworks and Ritual Knowledge

• What specialized knowledge was required for earthwork construction/deconstruction?

• Materials and engineering knowledge

• Site layout, astronomy, and ritual knowledge

Lunar alignments at Newark Earthworks, Ohio (Hively and Horn 1982)

Garden Creek Site, North Carolina

Figure: T. Horsley, APW

Figure: T. Horsley, APW

Erecting Garden Creek’s Enclosures: Labor

Total volume of earth excavated for Enclosure Nos. 1 and 2: 169.8 m3

Total person-hours required to create enclosure ditches: 322.6 person-hours

(assuming 1.9 person-hours/ 1 m3 earth; Erasmus 1965)

One person could have built Enclosure Nos. 1 and 2 in a single year (32.3 days)

(assuming 5-hour work day, 25-50 work days/year; Bernardini 2004)

Less than 3 dozen people could have built the enclosures in a single day

Erecting Garden Creek’s Enclosures: Ritual Knowledge

• Mirror images with exact geometric footprints

• Similar to Early/Middle Woodland enclosures in the Ohio Valley (top)

• Possible solar alignment (bottom); lunar alignment to be determined

Snake Den Group, Ohio(Burks 2014)

Winchester Farm, Kentucky(Jefferies et al. 2013)

Summer Solstice Sunrise

Summer Solstice Sunset

Erasing Garden Creek’s Enclosures:Labor and Materials

Sequence of Erasure

1. Re-fill open ditches with earthVolume: 169.8 m3

Person-Hours: 322.6 person-hours

Erasing Garden Creek’s Enclosures:Labor and MaterialsSequence of Erasure

2. Mark ditch circumference with line of large posts

8 person-hours to dig 160 postholes in both enclosures(assuming 0.05 person-hours/0.095 m3 posthole; Erasmus 1965)

65.6 person-hours to cut down 160 posts for both enclosures (assuming 0.41 person-hours/post using a stone axe; Mathieu and Meyer 1997)

Erasing Garden Creek’s Enclosures:Labor and Materials

Sequence of Erasure

3. Remove posts; fill holes with river cobbles24.6 person-hours to transport cobbles for all postholes(given 200 m to river, 3.84 m3 of cobbles needed to fill 160 postholes, and 0.32 person-hours to move 1 m3 over 10 m; Erasmus 1965)

Erasing Garden Creek’s Enclosures

Modeled 14-C Dates (2-sigma)

Bottom fill: cal A.D. 4 – 125

Middle fill: cal A.D. 9 – 124

Intrusive post: cal A.D. 24 – 135

Total person-hours to fill in the ditches, raise posts, and replace posts with cobbles: 420.8 person-hours

Erasing Garden Creek’s Enclosures: Ritual Knowledge• Precise sequence of refilling/replacing ditch possible

prescribed closing ceremony

• Associated ritual crafting activities mica and crystal quartz debitage in ditch fill

Implications of the Enclosure Events

Erecting and erasing Garden Creek’s enclosures involved low

labor demands but sophisticated ritual knowledge.

This combination links local activities at the microscale to

interregional networks and the historical macroscale.

Image adapted from Bernardini 2004

Acknowledgements:

The Garden Creek Archaeological Project received support from the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BCS-1225872), the Griffin Fellowship, and the Arts of Citizenship Program for Public Scholarship at the University of Michigan.

Many thanks to Sarah Sherwood, Tim Horsley, Ed Henry, Bret Ruby, Rob Beck, and

the GCAP crew for the expertise and conversations that contributed to this project.

A 21st century Southern Appalachian enclosure